professional ex

Last week, on a well-lit evening the Friday before July 4, at a bar, I met a pleasant stranger. He was my ex-husband. My sister took this photograph of me and my ex-husband and I’ve been staring at it off and on every day. Immediately after we divorced two years ago this month, I took to staring at photos also, but in a very different way, for a very different function. I’d clutch and predictably tear-stain old photos (physical pictures that were seen and developed by strangers at the Rite-Aid photo lab—we didn’t have a digital camera during our marriage). Photos of both of us grinning like idiots at each other, or else one of us grinning into the camera held by the other. I was obsessed with the happiness of love that was no longer felt, only locked into these sheets. The photos allowed me to indulge not only in lost love, but lost wifehood. Because my romantic anthem has always been the militaristically feminine shouting of Emily Dickinson:

I'm "wife"—I've finished that—

That other state—

I'm Czar—I'm "Woman" now—

It's safer so—

How odd the Girl's life looks

Behind this soft Eclipse—

I think that Earth feels so

To folks in Heaven—now—

This being comfort—then

That other kind—was pain—

But why compare?

I'm "Wife"! Stop there!

(199)

I’m “Wife”! Stop there! To me, being a “Wife” was the same as being a czar, to the creator of a soft eclipse, leaving behind the pain of that hesitant pack of solitary years known as “Girl.” After being dumped (let’s be specific about the means of the divorce) I was once again cast behind the eclipse, back to that old familiar hurt that rendered me incapable of uttering exclamation points. I was drawn to the photos of happier wifey days like a pure addict. But soon enough, I reached a visceral threshold; I couldn’t look at the photos any more. I overloaded on memories, and the euphoria of hurt just became, hurt. The buzz flowed over the rim of my psyche, and I locked the pictures away.

The truth is, while our divorce was hurtful, it was not bitter. My ex-husband and I have met and talked since becoming strangers. We’ve even had some nice, amiable hanging out over drinks. But before last week, no one had ever documented such moments. Thank God for little sisters with brand new i-phones. I didn’t know I looked like this talking to my ex-husband. I imagined that I’d be stiffly distant, a hopelessly plastic smile tarped over my teeth. Trying hard to get over it. But in this photo, I look relaxed, I’m listening, slouch-postured as always, my hair falling towards that man with the beard, unafraid of intimacy. I don’t feel pain looking at this photo—and my ex’s new boyfriend is even in the picture! (His head looks like it’s going into my skull.) The shock of this photo: I recognize myself! I mean, I recognize the girl that I carry around in my head every day. Which is no longer “ ‘Wife’—Stop There!”

So I had been married for almost ten years before our divorce. Of course being homosexuals, we were never legally married, even though we were in San Francisco, having already been living together for a few years and wore wedding bands when Gavin Newsom started handing out marriage certificates to gay couples from City Hall. But by that time, the legal ceremony seemed to us boring, unnecessary, or too much effort for a lazy-ass couple with a comfy case of bed-death. Or perhaps we were protecting ourselves from our induction into the grand gay divorce statistic. Whatever the reason, I am no longer Wife, I am Ex-Wife, I am Ex, I am X that marks the spot. I am the girl who enjoys, rather than creates, soft eclipses. But with a difference: a girl who’s back from the vacation of marriage.

My enjoyment of the photo of me and my own ex makes me realize that I am ok being an ex. I guess the real test might be yet to come: will I cry a little this coming Monday if Tori Amos plays “Doughnut Song” during her set at the Oakland Paramount Theatre? Maybe, but if I do, big deal. That’s what Exes do. I will enjoy being an ex to the extent that I’ll embrace it as some sort of feminine identity. Yes, my ex- husband and I had our time in the sun and can never fall and be in love the way we used to be. That’s what a divorce means. But being an ex means that I can still think about these past ten years of my life—those years with him—as a part of my present. Because what significance did marriage have for us? What real role did it play in our lives? My idea of love is what the philosopher Félix Guattri abstracts from “homosexuality”: “a kind of collective set-up of enunciation, a collective way of perceiving everything that happens.” We saw things together, we spoke back together to those things we saw. And that kind of perceptive reaction to the world can’t be unlearned because your husband divorces you, and you become not only his, but simply an, ex.

Not the black widow. Not a runaway bride. Not a serial monogamist. Not a girl who needs to be married, but a girl who likes to carry the stain of marriage. Just a boy who was some guy’s wife for most of his twenties.

transspinster

Well, another SF Pride has come and gone, and none too soon. Looking at that sentence I just wrote, I have to admit that sometimes I don’t know whether I am a bubbly misanthrope or a crowd-phobic spinster. I suspect that the two are actually the same girl. It’s not that I object to LGBT people having pride; I am not one of those righteous people who want to shit on political progress by advocating “Gay Shame.” Still, I’ve always been the girl who could never stand carnivals, fairs, or amusement parks, so any event that offers grilled meats on sticks and brightly colored free crap, I’ve always given a polite No Thank You to.

But this year, Pride felt different, a little worse than usual. I’d been having a shitty week emotionally, so I decided to forgo Dyke March, which is the one Pride event that I always brave through my agoraphobia/ demophobia. I’d whittled down my Pride celebrating to just one sleek minimalist bauble: volunteering as donations-collector on Pink Saturday. My dear friends Tara and Angie asked me to volunteer to raise money for Skate Like a Girl, or SLAG, a great non-profit organization that gives structure and support for female skateboarders. No brainer: I agreed, and signed my little sister up for good lesbian cross-identification measure.

The actual physicality of almost three hours spent standing with a bucket-necklace, gently accosting people for a few dollars was not so bad. Neither was the lobster-red-scorching I got as the UV rays penetrated through my flimsy SPF 30 Lancome moisturizer. But I went home feeling a little down.

First, it was a bit depressing how reluctant people are about donating money. Some fags actually gave shady attitude as a donation. “The economy” becomes a convenient excuse for any stinginess now, and it was out in full force Saturday afternoon. People shamelessly and brazenly telling me, “I have no money” while wearing $300 shades and downing Starbucks iced teas. Funny how people cannot donate five dollars to a non-profit but can turn around spend twenty on a stuffed dog made of rainbow fabric.

But more viscerally hurtful was the realization that the identity that we were all celebrating—“GAY”—had no personal meaning for me anymore. The Saturday of hanging out with the gals was great, but it had totally the opposite effect of what an event like Pride is supposed to have: I felt completely alienated from any group identification. Standing out there sloughing through the Pride crowd emphasized to me this sense of slipping through LGBT cracks.

Knowing I’d be participating, however peripherally, in a mainstream gay event, I prepared carefully my gender performativity Saturday morning. I contemplated wearing black lipstick, but nixed it: too costume-y, too adherent to the already carnivale-esque ethos of the event. A Meatmen tee shirt? Too much of a middle finger to homo-politics. Five-inch platform Chloé combat boots? Naw, I do have to stand for three hours. So I ended up assembled as you see in the above pic: old Chuck Taylor sneaks, old-man black wool socks, sawed-off Dickies workpants, Chloé aviator sunglasses, and the gay pièce-de-resistance: vintage Madonna tee shirt from 1992, with a full-body silkscreen of a Steven Meisel photo from the Erotica album art sessions.

While I got complemented multiple times for the tee shirt, its flagrant gayness only emphasized the emotional slippage I felt from gayness. I have become this illegible text. I look like a girl from a few miles away, but you can’t miss the gigantic knot of bone on my throat when you get up close—and certainly not the bass voice that comes out of it. But then, I make no efforts to pass as a girl. My femininity is an instinct and a psyche-preserving bodily function, not an attention-getting mechanism. I am not offended when mistaken for a girl, nor am I offended when the guy selling me smokes calls me “sir.” But Saturday, gatekeeping the Pride festival, I got to be juxtaposed and be read by a multitude of sexually-identified beings, and I felt no kinship to any of them. I was a long-haired fag wearing a vintage Madonna shirt, but really, I felt like this:

...a tranny whose big boobs are only in her photoshop dreams. After being an out proud gay man for nearly 15 years, the phrase “gay man” had become a foreign language to me. To use “gay man” to describe my body and psyche feels totally wrong. But this leaves me bodyless. I don’t feel like a gay man, but I am a homosexual genetic male; I feel like a femme dyke but I am not a lesbian (no sexual desire for women); I feel a close kinship to transsexuals but I feel pretty happy with the (male) body that I have.

I think I am read as “failed tranny” because my femininity owes more to Courtney Love than Madonna: it is messy, unpolished, comfy. It is more folk song circle than disco lights. And then, my body does not project the phallic radiation that the penis forces upon males, hetero or homo. In her poem, “Outside the Operating Room of the Sex-Change Doctor,” Sharon Olds describes seven penises:

The anaesthetic is wearing off now. The chopped-off sexes lie on the silver tray./ One says I am a weapon thrown down. Let there be no more killing./ Another says I am a thumb lost in the threshing machine. Bright straw fills the air. I will never have to work again. / The third says I am a caul removed from his eyes. Now he can see. / The fourth says I want to be painted by Géricault, a still life with a bust of Apollo, a drape of purple velvet, and a vine of ivy leaves. / The fifth says I was a dirty little dog, I knew he’d have me put to sleep. / The sixth says I am safe. Now no one can hurt me. / Only one is unhappy. He lies there weeping in terrible grief, crying out Father, Father!

To break down the meaning of Olds’ penises:

1. Weapon

2. Tool

3. Blinders

4. Classic homoeroticism

5. Horny animal

6. Self-preservation

7. Son to Daddy

My body doesn't exude any of these seven qualities (except #6, sometimes). Moreover, the seven uses of the penis that an MTF tranny has no use for and thus feels compelled to extricate through surgery, I already feel—with my penis intact. My refusal of these seven uses is the aura that I already use to navigate this world. I am a tranny whose brain is my vagina, but to the outside world, a brain-vagina is not a neo-vagina; thus I am a failed tranny. Another crack through which I fall.

Fall and wander. I’m the kind of tranny who is happy with my cock and flat chest but in my brain, I have a deep vulva...and the monumental boobs of Mariah Carey. I borrowed the chest of my supreme goddess for the photoshop fantasy I created above, but in a moment of ecstatic cultural kismet, it seems that Mariah herself is kind of fascinated by trannies herself. The cover image of her upcoming album is a tranny’s dream celebration of inflatable bra-fillers, and her new video will feature her as a drag king:

In my gender-loneliness, it’s comforting to have Mariah give tranny discourse. But I can’t live on fan-favorite fantasies forever. Will I ever find my own Pride group to parade with? More importantly, will I ever find a husband? I have an inkling suspicion that my destiny is to search for a bisexual man who likes flat-chested trannies. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!! How do you profile that one on match.com???

stinkbombshell

I love perfumes, and more specifically, the act and idea of wearing perfumes. But I have small nostrils. This leads me to often forget to breathe through my nose, leaves me panting like a dog, and gives me a terrible sense of smell. So my perfume has to be a good strong stinky perfume: one that is rough and tough enough to penetrate my tight little smell-holes. This is why even though I want to tell you about the experience of wearing perfume, I can’t tell you about it in the standard lingo of scent fetishists—I couldn’t tell you the difference between a “top note” and a “bottom note.” (There must be a “bottom note”?) The best way I could find of describing my attraction to bottled stink is to invoke one of my favorite art pieces, Mike Kelley’s series, Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology, in which Kelley placed found rag dolls in black boxes and placed over each a human-sized, two-dimensional rendering of the doll:

And here I am replicating Empathy Displacement: Humanoid Morphology with the black box packaging for a perfume I wear, Nasomatto Absinth:

Kelley has said that the combination of the opaque black box and rendering makes the actual doll physically inaccessible—an inaccessibility which then enhances the viewer’s ability to empathize with the inanimate object. I’m very drawn to this play between tangibility and emotionality: specifically, how the lack of body actually enables a strong emotional reaction. When I wear perfume, I imagine that I am a flat drawing of a doll trapped in a black box: the doll longs to live in the human world—to desire, elicit desire—but cannot because it is an object. I am the human medium that allows the inanimate object of the perfume to live its life. I am its fleshly conduit, and the immaterial physicality contained in glass bottles takes possession of my brain and limbs. The perfume doesn’t represent me; I represent the perfume, its indescribable viscerality.

Materially speaking, a smell is a bit of moisture made into air. It’s not just a thing, it’s nothing; it’s not just nothing, it’s nothing made into an object; it’s nothingness. I love it when I’m looking at a fashion magazine editorial, and at the bottom of the intricate price-and-textile description of the outfit that the model is wearing, it says in brazen incongruity: “Fragrance: Yves Saint Laurent Opium.” We can see the dress, okay, but to give credit to a scent in a two-dimensional photograph? What this reveals is that the concept of wearing a scent is really about wearing an idea. The perfume binds concept to the essential quality of scent. And usually, what is worn when one wears a scent is a concept of gender.

Like most things that pertain to bodies, perfume is gendered: man-spray is not called “perfume” but “cologne.” Moreover, in the bottled scent world, certain smells are considered “feminine” and others “masculine.” But the categorization of floral scents as “feminine” and musky scents as “masculine” is not based on any biological facts of sexuality. Perfumes are not imitation of glandular secretions. I mean, how many women do you know whose tampons smell like rose-petals? Or men whose cum rags smell like leather musk? “Floral” and “musk” are cultural biases about gender that are essentialized (literally) into bottles of liquids.

And yet, I love perfumes for this very essentializing quality. A good perfume is the perfect foundation for genderfucking. For in the public sphere, a man wearing stilettos puts himself in danger, but he can dump on as much Chanel No. 5 as he wants and who’s going to lynch him for his feminine stink? Perfume’s rigidly gendered taxonomy is what actually allows a gender fluidity. When I am wearing a perfume rather than a cologne, and when a woman wears Davidoff Cool Water rather than Chanel No. 5, we are simultaneously paying respect and lip-service to the existent gender meaning—or dare I say, essence—of stink. Our bodies are transformed by the narrative of the scent, but the narrative of the scent is also transformed by our wearing. Perfume may come in rigidly gendered packaging and ad copy, but it must by design be liberated into the ether of the world and become completely formless. This is why, aside from ck one, there are so few truly unisex fragrances: because perfumes have always been hermaphroditic.

Perfumes are genetically metaphorical; they can only function by association. The identity of stink must be wedded to a certain bottle shape, a certain designer, a certain model in the advertising campaign, and finally, a certain person who wears it who has an impact on you in your own life. My first fragrance was Issey Miyake L’Eau D’Issey: strong sharp orange. In 1995, my sister bought it in San Francisco during her first semester of undergrad at Berkeley and gave it to me as a Christmas present. After that, in the late 90s, I wore colognes as a link to certain masculinities I wanted: Boss Hugo Boss because that was the cologne of the boy I was in love with; Gucci Envy for Men because I was trying to be an open-shirted gigolo type fag. The sole exception during those years was the ubiquitous Thierry Mugler Angel, which I wore because its unmistakable chocolate smell expanded my olfactory nerves like a mega-dildo.

For most of the new millennium, I’ve been scentless. Instead of a scent I had a husband. I guess the proxy smell of natural man-stink was enough for me. But since 2006, post-divorce, I’ve been faithful to Tom Ford Black Orchid. And this is the first time that I’d really been attracted to the stink itself, rather than an external association. Black Orchid is sweet, but it is also musky and dank. And it is strong. To me, it is undoubtedly feminine, but it doesn’t at all smell “light,” the way most women’s perfumes smell. I rotate Black Orchid with two other perfumes that are her gangbanger sisters: Nana DeBary Bronze and Nasomatto Absinth, both perfumes that smell sweet but stinkingly so.

My friend Marisa says she feels naked without perfume; I am the same way. If I rush out of the house in the morning without three spritzes of perfume I feel pantless for the rest of the day. Recently, while I was replenishing my Black Orchid at Bloomingdale’s, the well-intending salesgirl suggested I try the new Prada, which was light and perfect for “day,” since my Black Orchid, with its smelly heft, was more of an “evening” scent. I refused to try the Prada with politeness, but what I really wanted to say was, “I will never wear a ‘light’ scent. I will always wear a scent matched for nights because I’m a gal who loves to dress in homeless gear as if it were an evening gown, and having my 30-year old threadbare t-shirts stink like dark evening perfume is like accessorizing with a major jewel or fur. Such a stink is invisible, but makes me feel indelibly feminine.”

a brick...i mean, a book, in my handbag

Quite recently, I came to the really obvious realization that I’ve been handbagging it. I was standing in a Muni train, just moderately crowded enough to cozily find a leanspace that allowed me to pull out my book (Mary Gaitskill’s beautiful new anthology, Don’t Cry) and read during my ride. But getting out of the train, I was so rushed at by pre-commuters that I didn’t have a chance to put the book back. Instead, I had to awkwardly maneuver the just-closed book from my hands to one hand, then clasp one edge while pulling the pink block of papered stories to my left breast. As I stepped off the train, a sense memory: a flush of babyfaggot femininity.

There were a couple of reasons why I had this flush of faggoty feminine youth, the central one being that in those few clumsy seconds, I was carrying a handbag. Ah, the catcall of the teenage homophobe: “Nice handbag, faggot!” And please, let’s be clear about this: I was not carrying a man-purse or whatever. This was a straight-up lady handbag, and a roomy one that made me feel like a luxe grunger: a red plaid flannel tote from 3.1 Phillip Lim’s second fall collection. Here’s what defines a true handbag, which also produces its awkward bodily syntax: the handles look broad enough to sling over the shoulder, but is actually just narrow enough to prevent it, therefore forcing the gal to wear it on hanging from her fist or the crook of her arm. The over-the-shoulder model of the handbag is actually an innovation in androgyny, borrowing from the technology of army knapsacks. A true handbag, like most traditional accoutrements of world femininity, hobbles the woman wearer. Holding a bag’s straps in her hand, or immobilizing her arm in a right angle to provide branch for the bag, robs the handbagger of the use of one arm.

Of course, we have been taught that such a robbing is a handicap, when I prefer to think of it as a disability. That is: not being able to use one arm is a profound loss if you understand “ability” as defined by a sparkly healthy body. But the tenets of physical health are often tied to masculine notions of physical boorishness. The logic of which is something like, suppose a bully came after you: how are you supposed to properly defend yourself if one arm is locked in the deadly (but delicious) embrace of a designer handbag?

My answer: well, the handbag doesn’t rob you of the use of your legs, does it? Of course, running away is so un-manly, I guess. Which goes along pretty well with how the mechanics of transporting goods has been gendered: if it allows you free use of your arms, you are pretty able-bodied and more aligned with men. But running away is not the only recourse available to a poor defenseless handbagger. There is a great moment in Jennie Livingston’s film Paris is Burning in which an attitudinous emcee at a drag ball comments on the evening ensemble of a ball walker: “Everybody knows that an evening bag is a must. No lady is safe at night.” In this pretty natural conclusion, the handbag becomes a weapon—that old adage about carrying a brick in your handbag is no joke. The item that hobbles you into femininity is that which can re-arm you. In this way, I think of the handbag as a pretty rad piece of low-fi technology: it physically handicaps you, but simultaneously gives you the prosthetic by which you can transform that handicap into an empowering identity of “the disabled.” The handbag is the ultimate feminine prosthetic.

But so much for its physical prosthetic uses. The handbag is an emotional prosthetic as well, which brings me to the second reason for my babyfaggot femininity sense-memory. When my handbag forced me to clutch the book in one arm, I was sent back to junior high and high school, when there was a gender politic to carrying your books. I’d be walking down the hall minding my own business and carrying my books, and some snotty-nosed boy (always a boy) would inevitably sneer about how I carried my books “like a girl.” Boys carried their books flat against their hip, their arm straight and parallel with the verticality of their posture. Girls hugged their books. I hugged my books. This is the memory that rushed through my capillaries that day, stepping off the Muni, book to boob.

But as I continued walking away from the train, flash-remembering all those moments of teenage torture, I didn’t put the book back away in the handbag. Instead, I spent the rest of the day in that same pose, hugging book with one hand, Phillip Lim bag hanging off an arm. It was quite an epiphanic exercise, with emphasis on “exercise.” It was tricky to figure out how to rifle through racks of vintage clothes when both arms were occupied with carrying things. (Solution: tuck book in armpit, hang handbag from same arm, and make sure that arm is not your writing arm.) But it strangely felt lovely. Part of it was reclaiming that homophobically tortured babyfaggot, plucking him from out of Iowa City into lovely San Francisco with me. But the other part was that I remembered the fetishistic function books have always had for me. All through junior high and high school, I carried, along with my ghetto generic Trapper Keeper and grocery-bagged textbooks, a novel. It was never a novel for English class, but “my own” novel, a novel I had picked out of the library for my own pleasure. They were usually huge, and often trashy, with some exceptions I suppose. In those six years, I was quite a book whore. But some still stand out: Kathreine Dunn’s Geek Love, John Updike’s Witches of Eastwick, Danielle Steel’s Kaleidoscope, Ruth Rendell’s Talking To Strange Men and Collected Stories, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. I remember these because I had the novels for not only story (these were great stories) but also for their beauty: books with fabulously designed book jackets. These books, unassigned by my teachers, were fetishes of my adultfaggot futurity, when someday I would leave the Midwest and have some lovely life, free. These great thick adult books were my babydrag handbags. Amid the warzone of adolescence, they made me feel simultaneously true to myself, and safe.

I do this still. I don’t leave the house without a book to read. But for so long, I’d thought of the book as a content of my handbag rather than as a handbag. In tribute to that small self from long ago, I’m going to begin this practice again. As you see above, I’ve currently been reading Boy George’s autobiography, Take It Like a Man (which I think is very apt, by the way). Boy George-as-handbag is a bit difficult, since it weighs a ton. So I thought I’d try out some other textual handbags for fun. The latest issue of my favorite magazine, French Vogue:

And my favorite art book, Karen Kilimnik’s Drawings:

Although as you can tell by the awesome outsizedness of Kilimnik’s book, it is quite dangerous to carry it as a handbag. Don’t try that at home.

joggernautte

I’ve become a jogger. Or at least, I’m going to try to be a good little jogger. Don’t get me wrong: I know myself well enough to know that I love my cabernet and whiskey, and I’ve long ago given up trying to give up smoking my beloved menthols (ridiculous tobacco taxes be damned!). But March was a total downer for me and it seemed time to add another identity to the cupboard of my psyche: jogger it is.

It is partly about exercise: sore thighs from running will do the same job as sore thighs from fucking to remind you that you have a physical existence outside of your mental one. But having been a muscle queen in my tweenies, I’m not new to the rigors of regimental exercise. It’s just that I haven’t carved out a place for it for a good decade—too busy being a wife and brain-spinner.

So being a jogger is partly about exercise, but partly about...a lovely pair of leggings. This Saturday, I went into the Niketown store in Union Square for the first time in a gazillion years, and spent the most satisfying $50 in recent memory, for a pair of black “dri-fit” leggings. And from the men’s department, no less! Men’s leggings they may be, but in a size small, they fit like stockings, with a discreetly dropped crotch for modesty, and a nice zippered backside marsupial pocket for keys and i-pod. Plus, the curved grey seaming is good and leg-lengthening for this bow-legged gal. So this athletic gear is actually very cute; glamorous, almost.

I was so eager to try these leggings out that I went for a run later that very same day. I don’t usually exercise at all during my teaching semesters. But during in the summer, I do like to go for a long run every few days. Surprisingly, I had a very nice run Saturday afternoon, making my usual four or so miles of the bike trail along I-80 in under 50 minutes, which was good for me—I hadn’t run since last year, and at least didn’t have to rest or anything. But then, I think I was encouraged by my jogging costume.

I paired the new leggings with an old t-shirt that was comfortably soft, but could be made beautiful with further breaking in: a 90s Van Halen shirt from their “For Unlawful Carnal Knolwedge” era, with a big rip near the appendix area. On my feet, I put on a pair of black suede New Balance trainers and white American Apparel footie socks—with red pom-poms at each Achilles heel. With my hair in a bumped-up Winehousey ponytail, I actually felt kinda cute.

Now, I never thought I’d be the kind of girl who dresses up to go to the gym. There were those in college—girls with showy sports bras, eyeliner/ shadow and lip gloss, lifting lady weights or doing slow crunches. Back then, in my white tank top and high on protein shakes, I’d scorn these gals as amateurs. And I still do believe this in principle: you work out to sweat, and when you sweat, you can’t look very cute. But there is something to “dressing up” to go jogging. On my path that afternoon, I crossed and felt kinship to both the woman jogging wearing a tank top that had a pattern of “bebe sport” and “glamorous” spelled out with sparkly beads AND the squat thuggish guy in heavy black sweat shirt, long shorts, and opaque shades. Dragging my body along the concrete curve on a forward path, fresh bay-air and freeway smog mixing into my air passage, endorphins gushing out of my glands, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s bootleg tracks and 90s handbag remixes of Boy George and Mariah pouring into my brain through my ear canals, feeling relatively cute and connected to disparate strangers, I thought: This is what it felt like when I used to go dancing every weekend.

It seemed both novel and natural to connect “jogger” and “dancer.” And suddenly I felt quite excited about “dressing up” to go jogging. I like it because I realized that it’s not much different from how I dress to go to a bar, and these days, I feel much better after jogging than I do after a typical evening at these increasingly homogenous gay bars. It felt liberating to attain a similar party high after doing something cleansing and dare I say, healthy. Although of course, after I finished my run and took a shower, I had to have a cigarette.

watchgirls

Does good audiencing grant you a gender? I think so, because certainly bad audiencing seems to be a manifestation of masculinity. Last week, on Friday the 13^th, I went to my first concert in I don’t know how long: the wonderful neo-shoegazer band Asobi Seksu at the Independent in San Francisco. There, I was treated to some beautiful music and showmanship by the headlining band. But I was also exposed to examples of some irksomely bad audiencing:

-Continuously frenching your boyfriend with your back to the headlining band for 97% of their set.

-Dragging your drunk girlfriend toward the front of the audiencing pit, then elbowing thrashers (i.e. moi) in an attempt to “protect” the lurching girlfriend who continuously whines: “I’m too drunk! I want to leave!”

-Making grabbing motions like you’re trying to catch a wedding bouquet when the lead singer takes off her heavy necklaces to do a nasty turn on the drum kit as the encore.

It seems like not that long ago that I was thrashing against sweaty pudgy white punkers at a Fantomas concert or being mosh-pitted wearing a corset and four pounds of black eyeliner at Kimo’s on Polk Street. The danger of physical injury due to possession by music is preferable to this bullshit. The above acts of bad audiencing were not all done by men, but they are people who value males and masculinity much too much. Why would this girl insist on cleaning her boyfriend’s tonsils with her tongue while there’s a band playing right in front of her? Is she so insecure that she feels a need to compete with the performance for her boyfriend’s attention? And why does this other guy prop up a girl about to fall down, endangering their fellow audience to her boozevomit? Does he think he’s being gallant when he is jutting his elbows out like a bouncer to deflect thrashing long hair away from his precious girlfriend? And really: just because a female performer starts taking off pieces of her costume doesn’t mean that she’s going to throw them at you like a stripper with her feather boa and pasties.

I’m not sure that being a good audience of a performative piece of art is necessarily feminine, although it feels that way. If femininity has been traditionally associated with passive reception, then it makes sense to connect the act of audiencing as traditionally feminine. But for me, the equation is not a disempowering one. To be a good audience to art means that you have to proactively perform a delicate dance of witnessing: you have to be passive enough to let the art seep into the pores of your senses, but then active enough to allow the art to shape an individual and meaningful reaction upon your body. The crime of the bad audiencing I witnessed at the Asobi show was that of indifference. Those male and female criminals of audiencing all refused to acknowledge and respect the spectacle of the performance before them so that they could push forth their own personal egos. That is truly, reductively, masculine, whether you are a boy or not.

Two weekends ago, I had the privilege of witnessing some really great audiencing. It was at, strangely enough, a Sunday afternoon show of “Watchmen.” I’m tempted, but won’t comment too much on the film itself, except to say: I surprisingly liked it—even though I am both a faithful comic book nerd who read the book as a teenager and a passionate hater of “300,” the neo-con homo-fascist film directed by the same man—because “Watchmen” is really a costume drama about the 1980s pretending to be a big sci-fi-action film. There. I won’t say anything more about the film itself because the film’s actual content was enhanced by the great audiencing provided at the AMC multiplex in Emeryville, where I saw the movie.

I’d been editing a manuscript all day, and so around 4 pm I decided to take a break , brave opening weekend lemming masses, and go to a showing of “Watchmen.” Because it was a packed house, I couldn’t really choose my seat (smelly nachos to my left, heavy-breathing popcorn cruncher to the right). As the film began, I found myself sitting behind something I’d usually go to Hell and back to avoid: a group of high school kids. I sat behind a group of teenagers, 15 years old at the most: three boys—two white, one black; and two black girls.

The girls came a bit later than the boys. They waved and mouthed a silent “Hi” to them and took their seats, right in front of me. They were petite, so at least they didn’t block my view. One of them was wearing her hair in a tidy ponytail with a ribbon-bow headband. As the movie progressed, there was the usual, predictable amount of hooting and cheering and hollering by stupid males during scenes of violence. Nothing like heads being kicked in and limbs being torn off to get boys to laugh and cheer like it was Christmas morning. What was beautiful in contrast was how focused these two girls in front of me were. Of course they made appropriate comments of puzzlement and squeamishness, but they were such great, sensitive film readers.

There was one particularly difficult scene: Silk Spectre I (played by Carla Gugino, who embodied perfectly the dark-campy balance of the character in the book) is almost raped by another superhero, the Comedian. When she resists by karate-kicking him down, he responds not only by hitting her back, but proceeding to beat her up with sadistic malice and protraction: punching her face and stomach repeatedly, throwing her against the pool table with a spine-snapping impact. Amid the equally sadistic male tittering that filled the auditorium, the two girls in front of me stayed silent, their gazes fixed to the screen. They didn’t act squeamish, they didn’t move in nervousness. They didn’t talk to each other. They were witnessing a useless male ego at work, expressed in violence against a woman, and as such, they were so appropriately silent and serious. After the movie, they joined their male friends (one of them who said he found the blue nude Dr. Manhattan “sexy”!!) in fast and upbeat dissection of the film. But in those couple of silent minutes, those two girls, one of whom with a ribbon in her hair, exuded a sensitivity that was breathtaking.

a tale of two sisters, part 2

Effeminacy is NOT femininity. Effeminacy is embodying femininity without consciousness regarding the condition of females in a patriarchal society. I was an effeminate kid; after experience and feminism, I am a feminine adult. Femininity used to be a behavior I couldn’t control in spite of colossal effort. Now, femininity is a choice. Femininity is a behavior that demands not control, but thoughtful finessing and nurture.

This is a subtle fact that I recently found I’d been learning through my little sister...that is, if a public defender-trial attorney who makes almost twice as much salary as I do can indeed be called “little sister!” My sister has a unique relationship to footwear. Like a lot of stereotypical females, she is obsessed with buying shoes. Last summer, as a gift, I gutted and organized her closet. I had to empty out a small bookshelf of books left over from college to house her shoes. (Can’t run from blood: I have a similar bookshelf I use to store old t-shirts) But the funny thing about Meenha’s shoe-obsession that it is bipolar in gender. She collects, predictably for a thin gal with long hair and penchant for mod/ 90s raccoon eye makeup, interesting high heels. But she also spends equal time and energy (if not dough) collecting basketball shoes. And I don’t mean vintage high-tops in cute girly colors and dip-dyed in irony. I mean real baller shoes: she keeps up with whatever latest shoe Nike (or Reebok or whatever) brings out in homage to whatever basketball player is dominating the scene. It is the strangest scene: she has rows of towering 4 or 5-inch heelers next to clunky white leather court shoes that all look alike (to me).

Her Louboutins next to her Lebrons:

What’s more interesting, she follows an interesting sartorial philosophy centered on these shoes: unlike most gals, she wears the heels in the daytime and basketball shoes in the night time. Meenha will wear these outrageous designer stilts—like the Louboutin “Declic” or the Jil Sander pumps with pyramidical heels (first pic)—to work. She hobbles about expertly in unforgivingly tailored skirt-suits and 5-inch heels, all the while providing due process to keep the U.S. justice system functioning. Then, when she’s getting ready to go out to a club or dinner with friends, she’ll change into a Castro fag uniform—fitted leather jacket, Rick Owens tank, trousery jeans—and top it all down with her Lebrons.

Now, this is a look I would never rock for myself, but it has, weirdly enough, influenced my own feminine style. My sister refuses to do corporate power drag for her day-job as a lawyer. For her, dressing close to androgyny is not a magic skin to force and power. Instead, she piles on a pound of eyeliner and steel-black eyeshadow. She’ll rarely wear her hair up—it’s always gently teased and flowing out like Cindy Crawford circa 1992. And then the stilettos. I’ve watched her in action in the courtroom and it’s pretty impressive: she is a sharp and thunder-voiced woman who displays great poise, calm, and logic in face of her opponents. When she combines these traditionally “masculine” traits with her overly feminine style, what you get is not androgyny but a dark, empowering femininity. Her Louboutins are a different kind of court shoes, for a different kind of court. Meenha’s courtroom skills are not undercut by her femininity. Rather, femininity forces observers to re-think how we gender certain skills in the first place. You have to start thinking: perhaps logic mixed with guerrilla aggression has always been akin to beige lipstick, dominatrix pencil-skirts and high heels.

Conversely, I love that my sister does not feel the need to “dress up” to go out at night: no leg-baring skirts, no strappy shoes, never a plattered cleavage (neither front nor back). You could throw her going-out outfit onto a twenty-year old babyfag and he’ll look quite smashing. But on my sister, the outfit doesn’t look like male drag; its potential masculinity is subsumed by her femininity. This is how I learned femininity should be worn: thrown-on, casual, but always overpowering.

The opposite of femininity is masculinity, but aggressive power is not the opposite of femininity. A couple Friday nights ago, my friend Tara J. and I were leaving Daddy’s (a bear-leather bar in the Castro, now known as 440 Castro) when a scruffy old fag sneered after us: “There’s a lot of women in the gay bar tonight!” As Tara said: “Yeah, like two of us among 200 fags is a lot.” Our anger at the guy’s sexism made me think about how this fag viewed himself when he drew such a heavy identity-wedge between himself (the rightful occupant of a “gay bar”) and women: does he think that his facial hair and lumberjack clothes and pathetic Caucasian machismo automatically makes him the opposite of “woman”? It seemed funny to me that he made his sexist observation in a high, nasal, faggy-affected speech? How could he be so unaware of his effeminacy, and how that links him to the very femininity that is a major cultural-historical component of the idea of “woman”? At his age, he ought to know better.

Effeminacy is an ultimately infantile stage: you do what you do without realizing what it is, and how it accrues and radiates meaning in the world. Obviously, it is not a bad thing, but it is a preconscious state...and consciousness is always a better thing. So I don’t feel like I need to wear heels every day to feel more aware of my femininity. My stand-by shoes are not Louboutins but worn-torn Converse high-tops. I wear them and feel like I’m wearing ballet slippers, or a corset made for my feet. I wear them and feel like my sister, gliding around the nightlife in Lebron stompers.

The affections are more reticent than the passions, and their expression more subtle. If she herself should ever fall in love with a man, she, like Helen, would proclaim it from the house-tops, but as she only loved a sister she used the voiceless language of sympathy. (E.M. Forster’s Howards End)